Amul Chocolates plans to be a Rs 10 bn brand

From modest milk chocolate for kids 45 years ago to sophisticated dark chocolate for adults, Amul is a part of India's history.Vinay Umarji visits its spanking new production plant in Anand, Gujarat.

IMAGE: An Amul ad. Photograph: Kind courtesy Amul Facebook page

Quick quiz: What do Madagascar, Tanzania, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, the Ivory Coast and Peru have in common?

Answer: They are the leading cocoa bean producers in the world.

In India, they are also the names of varieties of dark chocolate launched by the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), widely known as Amul.

Their elegant, 125-gram packs have been catching the eye of consumers.

And why?

Because these sophisticated chocolates cost just a third of broadly equivalent imported brands.

Chocolate is not new for Amul.

It is said that in the early 1970s cocoa farmers in South India sought Verghese Kurien's help in replicating Amul's success in milk co-operatives -- the White Revolution, as people of a certain generation will recall -- to cocoa and also asked him to set up a chocolate plant.

Thus was born Amul Chocolate in 1973, with GCMMF's flagship dairy, Kaira Milk Union, better known as Amul Dairy, in Anand, Gujarat, setting up a 200 metric tonne per month plant.

At the time, the plant was considered modern, with the latest machines being imported for the various processes involved in chocolate-making.

For over a decade, Amul chocolates did quite well, especially among children.

The brand was led by 40-gram milk chocolates in six varieties.

For a while, Amul's chocolate even gave the perennially popular Cadbury's a run for their money.

And then, inexplicably, they melted away into oblivion, at least as far as the retail market was concerned.

Amul supplied the bulk of its chocolates to institutions as raw material for ice-cream, including to its own plants.

"For some reason, the capacity utilisation remained at around 40 to 50 per cent and largely institutional. We also started focusing on milk and other products," explains R S Sodhi, managing director of GCMMF.

Amul did attempt a comeback briefly in the early 2000s when it launched the Chocozoo variant -- assorted animal-shaped milk chocolates targeted again at children.

There were also launches in the gifting arena, with Amul Relish and some variants in chocolate bars.

But these didn't last long.

"Even till the early 2000s, we were following Cadbury's. Then the shift happened where other domestic and international brands started emerging and the market matured," recalls Sodhi.

For Amul, the shift that Sodhi refers to came in the form of their dark chocolate brand, which was received warmly by consumers in 2015-2016.

Revamped in a 150-gram rectangular pack, the product was a clear shift.

The plain dark chocolate was quickly followed by variants such as Tropical Orange, Mystic Mocha and Bitter Dark Chocolate.

The last had an unusually high cocoa content of 75 per cent.

"We decided to go with bigger-sized dark chocolate variants because the popular imported chocolates in the market at that time were of that size. We knew we could launch an equal or better quality of dark chocolate priced substantially lower, and we did," says Sodhi.

From targeting children, Amul shifted its focus to teenagers and adults, even as it chose to 'premiumise' its product.

"We have an internal team in the chocolate business that keeps researching innovative products. The team not only decided on premiumising chocolate by launching dark variants but also research global trends," says Sodhi.

The team found that none of the major retail chocolate brands in the country had launched country-origin variants of dark chocolate.

Amul reached out to each of the top cocoa-producing countries and started sourcing cocoa solids, a combination of cocoa butter and cocoa powder, as raw material.

Unlike other country-origin products in the market that use only the essence or flavour of the origin country while mixing it with an Indian cocoa base, Amul claims its chocolates use the entire cocoa base from the country of origin.

By 2016, the new variants were a hit with consumers, persuading Amul to rethink their production.

"That's when we decided to expand our production capacity," says Sodhi.

An extension of the existing plant on the 22 acre campus in Mogar village, 15 km from the flagship Amul milk and butter plant in Anand, the expanded plant is technologically on par with the country's leading chocolate makers.